Mandarin: Listener comment on the Hong Kong media

MANDARIN: LISTENER HOTLINE – Hong Kong Media (08/09/07)
Reporter: Wei Lian
Length: 5:10

Wei Lian: Hi, this is Listener Hotline. I’m Wei Lian.

Male Voice: Hi, Mr. Wei Lian.

Wei Lian: Please tell me where you are calling from.

Male Voice: Jiangxi.

Wei Lian: Hi, listener from Jiangxi. Please go ahead.

Male Voice: I have a question for you. Recently, I read some articles on Chen Liangyu’s case in Hong Kong’s Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao. I’ve found that the Hong Kong media is very different from what it used to be.

Confessions of a karaoke addict: Three music videos for Hong Kong’s anniversary

“Because you are there” (in Chinese “You were always there”, and while it’s Hong Kong that was alluded to in the lyrics, one can’t help but read it as a paean to the Motherland.) It’s hard to describe this official theme tune for the 10th anniversary of the handover. My first thought was: “Ah, Hong Kong’s got its own Malaysia song!”

Mandarin: The Internet and civil rights in China

RFA Mandarin service reporter Wu Jing is currently airing an eight-part feature series on the Internet in China (ZH), and its role in the country’s civil rights movement. Here, she summarizes her programs in English, beginning with Part 1:

A magazine editor in Fujian province for example confesses that, staying online 12 hours everyday, he is in a state of being” possessed by the devil.” His online activities include almost everything from chatting to listening to music, watching movies, booking flight tickets, looking up maps, and to writing and publishing articles. The Internet has intruded his life so deeply and widely that he cannot imagine what life would be like without it.

Panel discussion on press freedom and the Internet in China

Yin-Ting Mak: The Internet plays a large role in compelling the traditional media to change. Traditional media will feel the pressure if it fails to report what the Internet has reported. People won’t read newspapers and magazines if they do not report what the Internet has reported. 

Cao Changqing: Newspapers have to cater to their readers, who are their “gods.” They will not select newspapers that do not report the truth. 

Liu Xiaobo: As the online media has become increasingly free of restrictions, traditional media has realized that, even if it does not report or get involved in something, the online media will. As a result, it has been using the strategy of “touching the outer edge of the penalty area” in news reporting. 

Yin-Ting Mak is the former chairperson of the Hong Kong Journalists Association, Cao Changqing is the former deputy editor-in-chief of Shenzhen Youth News, and Liu Xiaobo is a writer and freelancer.

Poems for June 4: Wang Dan and Luo Yihe

These poems are taken from a collection published on RFA’s Mandarin Web site for the 18th anniversary of the June 4, 1989 crackdown, in which hundreds, perhaps thousands of people were killed by People’s Liberation Army troops. Wang Dan (ZH) was a prominent leader of the student protest on Tiananmen Square, and spent seven years in prison in the northeastern city of Liaoning. He was exiled to the United States and is currently a PhD student at Harvard. Luo Yihe (1961-1989) was a professional poet who died on hunger strike during the pro-democracy protests of 1989:

 

in the hours between dusk and dawn
we believe in everything –
taste the revenge of time
in joys not yet arrived

 

– Wang Dan

Bao Tong’s June 4 essay: Pressure is a good thing

UPDATE: Poems for June 4th. This essay was broadcast recently by RFA’s Mandarin service, to commemorate the 18th anniversary of the military crackdown on June 4, 1989. Here is their anniversary page (ZH), including a collection of poems written for the occasion by prominent intellectuals and dissidents:

“An utterly repressive society leads to an utterly corrupt prosperity. Repression has split China down the middle, into a paradise for corrupt officials, and a purgatory for those with no power. The one-party, authoritarian system dominates China: it is used to deploy personnel, to make laws, to administer the country, to administer judicial affairs; it is the supreme principle to which all others must bow, for all its corruption.” – Bao Tong

Perry Link speaks about the state of censorship in China

On May 1st, the Freedom House and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (the US entity that oversees Radio Free Asia) held a half-day session on “21st century threats to media freedom.” Perry Link, professor of East Asian Studies at Princeton University, spoke about China’s state of censorship and how it has evolved over the last 30 years…

Professor Link said that while the CCP still holds ultimate power on what goes into the media, the ways it goes about it have changed to become far more insidious. As a result lots of young people in China know nothing about the Tiananmen massacre or Tibet and host of other issues deemed forbidden topics.

Listen to Professor Link’s statement (10 minutes.)

Related links:

Poems for June 4th. 

Interview with the former editor of Baixing magazine, whose hard-hitting reporting earned him and his staff the wrath of the powerful Central Propaganda Department.

Leaked document? A ghost in China’s propaganda machine

Publishing crackdown begins July 1

A hotshot civil rights laywer from the north tells it like it is… Mo Shaoping on YouTube

Mayday! Mayday! Thoughts on history, colonialism and activism

Plastichk writes about the last day of the Star Ferry pier in Hong Kong (in Chinese). Below, Chow Yun Fat (with whom I feel a great affinity, having lived on Lamma Island for many years) signs a petition to save it. For me, there is a definite connection to May 1

Hu Jia’s trip to Hong Kong

Here is the direct transcript of an interview with Hu Jia broadcast recently by the Cantonese service. You can read more about Hu in English here. He did in fact return to China on March 31:

Mandarin: Interview with Hu Jia (03/22/07)

Reporter: Christie

Christie (C): During an interview with our station’s Cantonese Service on Thursday, (March 22, 2007), Hu Jia stated that after over 200 days of house arrest, he was both mentally and physically exhausted. His wife Zeng Jinyan worried that he would not be able to endure if the situation continued, so she conceived the idea of sending him abroad to recuperate. They chose Hong Kong as their first leg. He was surprised that he did not meet with any obstruction when applying for the pass to Hong Kong.

Can you hear me, Major Yang?

Problems accessing the Internet in many parts of Northeast Asia following the snapping of undersea data and phone cables in Tuesday’s quakes off Taiwan look set to continue. Repair work on the ocean floor is technically tricky, and some telecoms providers are warning that it won’t be a matter of days.

Weiai Xu, writing on OhMyNews, details much of the mayhem that is hitting China. Yahoo! China has put a message up on the login page warning of delays. Major service providers have already confirmed that the Chinese Web has slowed down as a direct result of earthquakes. He says:

A recent survey result on China’s largest Internet portal, sina.com, has shown that up to 97 percent of netizens are having problem in accessing overseas Web sites, and among them 58 percent said they were severely affected by the link problem.

There is little doubt that inconveniences are perceptible but what really concerns people is how serious the economic loss might be due to the disconnections.

But according to Liam Bailey, Taiwan’s tremor (which measured 7.2 on the Richter scale) wasn’t the only one to strike on Boxing Day (Dec. 26). Tuesday, he writes:

saw three earthquakes. A major one in Taiwan that measured 7.2 on the Richter scale will no doubt engulf the smaller two in world media reports as the damage and death toll continues to be updated.

The smaller ones occurred in Scotland, a 3.1 tremor centered near Applecross, Wester Ross, in the West Highlands and a 3.5 tremor in Dumfries and Galloway, not too far from where I live. Fortunately, I never felt it.

Then of course there was the devastating earthquake that caused the Asian tsunami on Dec. 26, 2004. (If you’d like a retrospective, RFA journalists blogged that event)… What is it about Boxing Day?